Digital twin communities: an approach for secure DT data sharing

Digital Twin (DT) technology empowers organizations to create virtual counterparts of their physical assets, thereby magnifying their analytical, optimization and decision-making capabilities. More specifically, the simulation capabilities of a DT generate high-quality data that not only benefit the DT owner organization, but also increase the potential of similar organizations by leveraging the DT’s capabilities when sharing its simulation results This collaborative sharing boosts the capabilities of each participating organization, fostering a collective intelligence that amplifies their competitive advantage. Nonetheless, data exchange must rigorously safeguard each organization’s data confidentiality, and access to this data must be thoroughly controlled. Thus, this paper introduces the novel concept of DT communities and proposes a hybrid access control architecture. This architecture seamlessly integrates the strengths of both Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Organizational Based Access Control (OrBAC), facilitating secure, authorized intra- and inter-organizational information sharing in the context of Industry 5.0, combining the strengths of local DT communication and other organization’s DTs as well. Moreover, in order to show the feasibility of the approach for critical corporate organizations and their systems, in this paper we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of this architecture. To validate its functionality and efficiency, we perform a number of experimental studies showing how various entities can benefit from securely sharing DT models based on the concept of “community".